I'm frequently asked by real estate agents and brokers, "If I get 100 visitors in a week to my web site, how many of those will send me an email?" And that's when I explain to them that the Internet is nothing more than a Big Numbers Game. You need several hundred people clicking on your site each week just to ensure that a small percentage will turn into actual leads. "And how will they find my site?" is the next question they ask. Then I launch into my stock speech, "There are 6 ways in which people find Realtors on the web." And I go through the 6 ways: 1. searches on the search engines, 2. national real estate directories and portals, 3. local and regional directories, 4. your listings found on listings sites, 5. your offline marketing efforts, and, finally, 6. banner advertising. Yes, my company runs banner ads on behalf of our real estate portal on several major search engines and directories. And, yes, the banner ads achieve excellent click through rates, sometimes into double digits. And the ads generate something in the neighborhood of 3 million "impressions" per month, which benefits all the Realtors in our system. But that's just one of numerous ways in which you will be found, I tell agents, assuming that you market your web site using all the methods I've already mentioned. So, yes, advertising click through rates are a helpful measure of what's working to drive traffic to real estate portals and ultimately to Realtors. But if you're an agent or broker looking into what's going to send traffic into your site and bring you leads, banner ads are no more than one-sixth of the whole story. And I would think that you owe it to your future to learn how to benefit from the other five-sixths as well.

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